Despite being an almost impeccable speller and grammarian (or is that "grammaratician", ha ha), I have slipped up on occasion. I once used the word quay (pronounced "key") in a song, thinking it was pronounced "kway", and I rhymed it with bay. Imagine my embarrassment when someone pointed out that one. I had to rewrite the verse. The song was an early one anyway...one of those adolescent unrequited love laments...a pretty lousy song. It has been recycled in the compost bin for quite some time.

Another word I used to mispronounce was derelict. I pronounced it "derilect". The same someone caught me on that one, and I corrected it.

NU-CU-LER is the one that bugs me most!!! Why the hell can they not say it the right way...New-Clee-Arr...I grit my teeth when I hear someone say "Nucular". AAAAAAARGGHH!

Then there's "hellacious". Some marines seem to have come up with that. "Hellish" wasn't cumbersome enough for them, so they had to add an extra syllable. Not that "hellacious" doesn't convey the idea effectively, but it's wrong, that's all.

"Bodacious" is another word that seems to have evolved in the same fashion. Duh! Same with "humungous", which used to be "huge". And "disorientated", which used to be "disoriented". And "at that point in time" (major Duh!), which used to be "at that point" or "at that time". If you read the book "stalking the wild pendulum", you will discover that there is in fact no such thing as a "point in time"...but I digress. It's odd that rednecks, who are by nature rather inarticulate (generally), and who admire rough and inarticulate speech, will go to great lengths to make the language more complicated and convoluted than it already IS...in their search for simplicity! Gaaaaak!

More examples: A country singer almost never simply says "my heart", he says "this heart of mine". Ha! Or to put it more specifically, he/she says "thiyis hooort of mahhhhhn". If he's really seriously country, he says "this here heart of mine", adding yet one more completely redundant word to the phrase. This is probably because he doesn't know that the word "this" already indicates "here", whereas the word "that" indicates "there".

"Thiyis hyere hooort of maaahhhn, ayand thayat theyer hoooortt of yoooorn..."

God, it's enough to make you turn in your antlers and retire to a monastery, there to ponder the vicissitudes of earthly existence on a planet where numerous visiting aliens have yet to find intelligent life, which is probably why they have avoided making direct dimplomatic contact thus far, especially when visiting Texas. They always keep all shields up on MAXIMUM when flying over Texas.

If I made any typos above, forgive me. It's easy to do without noticing.